James Tissot

The Adoration of the Magi

The Adoration of the Magi is one of the 365 watercolor compositions of the Life of Christ that Tissot produced between 1886 and 1894 after his religious conversion. The series — published as La Vie de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ in Paris in 1896–1897 and acquired in 1900 by the Brooklyn Museum, where it remains the principal collection of his Bible watercolors — traces the Gospels in chronological order from the Nativity through the Resurrection and Ascension. Tissot researched the topography, costume, and architecture of the Holy Land in person on three trips to Palestine and Egypt between 1886 and 1889; the resulting watercolors set every scene in plausibly observed first-century Jewish settings rather than in the European Renaissance idiom that had defined Christian painting for the previous four hundred years. The Magi composition shows the three travelers and their retinue arriving at a low Bethlehem dwelling, with the Holy Family seated inside, lit from within against a desert evening sky.

Pilate Washes His Hands

Pilate Washes His Hands, from the same Life of Christ watercolor cycle of 1886–1894, illustrates Matthew 27 — the Roman governor publicly absolving himself of responsibility for the death of Jesus by performing the ritual hand-washing in front of the assembled crowd. Tissot stages the moment from a vantage point inside the Praetorium courtyard, looking out at the steps where Pilate stands in profile and a servant pours water from a metal ewer over his hands into a wide basin. The crowd gathered below is rendered with Tissot's characteristic ethnographic care — Roman soldiery, Jewish religious authorities, and ordinary onlookers in distinct period dress. The composition is among the most reproduced and most quoted in twentieth-century Christian devotional materials; its image of public, performative absolution recurs throughout sermon illustrations, Sunday-school teaching aids, and printed devotional books for over a century.

What Our Saviour Saw from the Cross

What Our Saviour Saw from the Cross, completed around 1890 in the Life of Christ watercolor series, is one of Tissot's most original contributions to the Crucifixion iconography. The viewer occupies the position of Christ on the cross looking down at the scene below: the Virgin and the women, the centurion's horse, the soldiers casting lots, the foreshortened crowd around Golgotha, and at the far edge the city of Jerusalem fading into late-afternoon haze. The vantage point — adopted by no major European Crucifixion painter before Tissot — turns the spectator into a participant in the suffering and the seeing rather than an observer of it from below. The watercolor is the single best-known piece of the series and has been reproduced in countless devotional books, prayer cards, and illustrated children's Bibles since its publication in the 1890s.

The Pilgrims of Emmaus on the Road

The Pilgrims of Emmaus on the Road, from the Brooklyn Museum Life of Christ series, illustrates Luke 24: the risen Christ joining the two disciples on the road to the village of Emmaus on the afternoon of the Resurrection, the disciples not yet recognizing him. Tissot paints the three figures walking in a single horizontal band across the foreground, the disciples in animated mid-conversation, the cloaked figure of Christ slightly behind them in profile. The landscape — a dusty Judean road winding through low rocky hills, with the village in the distance — was sketched on Tissot's own walks in the Holy Land during his 1886–1889 Palestine and Egypt travels. The composition was one of the most-quoted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century English-language Bible illustration and shaped the visual vocabulary of countless subsequent Emmaus images.

Mary Magdalene Questions the Angels in the Tomb

Mary Magdalene Questions the Angels in the Tomb, from the same 1886–1894 Life of Christ cycle, illustrates the moment in John 20 when Mary, having returned to the tomb after the disciples had left, looks in and sees two angels in white seated where the body of Christ had been. Tissot frames the scene from a low angle through the rough opening in the rock, with the bowed Magdalene foregrounded in profile and the two angels seated in soft mutual symmetry on either side of the empty linen-strewn shelf. The light comes from above and behind, leaving the front of the chamber in deep shadow. The composition is among the most reproduced of Tissot's watercolors of the Resurrection sequence and was widely copied in late-nineteenth-century Catholic and Protestant devotional publishing on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Resurrection

The Resurrection, from the closing sequence of the Life of Christ watercolors, depicts the moment of the rising itself — Christ standing fully clothed in white at the mouth of the open tomb, the soldiers fallen unconscious or fleeing, the burial linens still folded behind him. Tissot characteristically refuses the Renaissance conventions of triumph: there is no banner, no flag, no upward-pointing gesture; the figure stands quietly in the predawn light. Two angels seated above the tomb and a small group of women still some distance away complete the composition. The watercolor closes the Resurrection cycle of the series and was one of the principal pieces in the touring exhibitions of the original 365 watercolors that Tissot organized in Paris and London in 1894–1895 to enormous popular acclaim before the entire collection was acquired by public subscription for the Brooklyn Museum in 1900.